Acrylonitrile-Butadiene-Styrene (referred to as ‘ABS’, hereinafter) has been widely applied in electric appliances, electronic products and office automation machinery. However, this resin itself is not flame retardant. So, it is necessarily changed to flame retardant ABS resin by adding a flame retardant and an auxiliary flame retardant in order to endow flame retardancy to the resin.
However, when a flame retardant and a auxiliary flame retardant are added to ABS resin in order to improve flame retardancy, mechanical properties and physical properties of the resin including impact strength, melt flow index and elongation are significantly reduced.
That is, the flame retardant ABS resin produced with the addition of a flame retardant and auxiliary flame retardant is expected to have poor mechanical properties, particularly poor impact strength and melt flow index. Therefore, it is important to develop a flame retardant ABS resin having excellent physical properties.
As explained hereinbefore, a flame retardant necessarily added to a flame retardant ABS resin is a major cause of reducing mechanical properties of the resin. To overcome this problem, various additives and stabilizers can be tried to increase impact strength and melt flow index. However, the addition of expensive additives raises the prime cost and might reduce other physical properties of the resin.
Therefore, it is required to develop a novel flame retardant ABS resin having excellent impact strength, melt flow index and flame retardancy.